Pearl Buck - The Eternal Wonder

“Ah, I could never have the patience,” she told him. “But you—you must know people. You must know all kinds of people, not only what has happened to them but why they are as they are.”

Each day was indeed new learning and he might have accepted this without planning its end, except that one evening Mr. Kung asked him to come the next morning to his shop. There in his office he had a matter to discuss with him. He had of course been many times in Mr. Kung’s vast shop, a museum indeed of every variety of art object. Stephanie had led him thither whenever a new shipment came in from an Asian country, and he had learned the history of one country and another and one century and another. He learned the many qualities of jade and topaz, ivory and rubies and emeralds. He had never, however, seen Mr. Kung’s private office, far in the back of the treasure-filled rooms.

“Shall I come too, Father?” Stephanie asked.

“No, it is not necessary,” Mr. Kung replied.

It was the end of an evening. Winter was over, the city was crowded again, and the spring season had begun. He and Stephanie had been to the opening of a new play and, returning, had found Mr. Kung waiting for them in the library, where, magnifying glass in his hand, he had been examining a long hand scroll of Chinese landscape. When they came in he had put scroll and glass aside and, having made his invitation to the shop, he was mounting the stairs to his own rooms.

They watched him from the foot of these stairs, and Stephanie’s face grew sad.

“Do you see how feebly he walks now?” she whispered. “He has been failing all winter. Yes, he never complains. What has he to say to you tomorrow, I wonder?”

“I wonder too,” he said. “But I think we know.”

She looked at him with sorrowful eyes, but she spoke resolutely. “Whatever he asks of you, Rann, you must not do it unless it suits your life. You have your own genius!”

“PLEASE SEAT YOURSELF,” MR. KUNG said affably.

He sat down in the chair Mr. Kung indicated with a wave of his long, thin hand. It was a Chinese chair, armless and straight-backed, of polished dark wood. The back was decorated with an inset of landscape marble. Mr. Kung explained the marble inset in the chair, a special marble from the province of Yunnan in South China, which, when cut crosswise in thin slabs, was so veined that the dark streaks seemed to compose a landscape and sometimes even a seascape. The room was entirely Chinese. Scrolls hung on the walls and tall potted plants stood in the corners.

The chair Mr. Kung had assigned to him was on the left of the square table that stood in the center of the inner back wall of the room. Mr. Kung, as the elder, sat in the opposite chair on the right of the table. A Chinese manservant in a long blue Chinese robe entered silently with a teapot and two covered tea bowls. He set the tray on a side table, removed the covers from the bowls, filled the bowls with tea, covered them again, and with both hands placed one bowl before Mr. Kung and the other before the guest. Then silently he left the room.

“Drink,” Mr. Kung said, and lifting his bowl he put aside the cover, sipped the hot tea, and set the bowl down again.

“My daughter tells me she has shown you many sights,” Mr. Kung said.

“We’ve had a wonderful time together,” he replied, and waited.

Mr. Kung was silent for a few minutes, as though in meditation, then abruptly began to speak.

“I am Chinese. My family in China is very ancient and honorable. We are Mandarins. I do not know how many of my brothers are still living. Nor do I know where, except for my youngest brother who escaped to Hong Kong. He lives there under another name and he does business for me there. I came to Paris many years ago, but before I could complete my studies the government in my country changed. At that I might even have returned had it not been that my honored parents were among the first to be killed. We were landowners and my parents were killed by our own farm tenants, who were land-hungry peasants. Without parents, I was compelled to arrange my own life. It was not possible for me to return to my country to marry the woman to whom I had been betrothed by my parents when we were both children. Her parents too, and she herself, probably, were also killed. Therefore I arranged my life. I had an American—what do you call it—an ‘amie.’ You understand?”

He nodded in reply, and Mr. Kung continued.

“I should have known better—but she wished me to marry her because she was pregnant and I did so. I wanted a family. I had a duty to carry on my family. A son would have been Chinese, though he had foreign blood. He would have borne my name. Therefore I married. As it turned out, she had been pregnant but she lost the first child through a miscarriage. I’ve always thought she caused it deliberately and at the time I was very angry. When she became pregnant the second time, a year later, I myself saw to the details of her care. My daughter was that child. Then later, the mother—the woman—became enamored of an American, an artist, not even a good artist, either. She left me when the child was only six years old. But she has been a good child, very intelligent. Yet she is a daughter. You also find her intelligent?”

“Very intelligent,” Rann said.

“And—beautiful?” Mr. Kung asked.

“And beautiful,” he agreed.

Mr. Kung sipped his tea again and set the bowl down as before. He cleared his throat and proceeded.

“I am encouraged, then, to go on with what I am about to propose. First, let me say that of all the young men I have seen, you are the only one I would choose as my son to be born to me. You have an old soul. I am too modern to believe in reincarnation—and yet I am old enough that I believe. I wish you were my natural son. It could have been so. Your mind is pure intelligence. You speak little but you understand everything. When I tell you something—anything—I can see you already know.”

What could he say? He remained silent.

“In my country,” Mr. Kung went on, “we have an ancient custom. Where there is no heir, no son to carry on the family name, the favorite son-in-law, the husband of a favored daughter, is adopted as the true son. He assumes the family name. He becomes the son, the heir.”

Mr. Kung held up his hand to stop reply, for he had lifted his head, he had opened his mouth to speak. “Wait! I said heir . I am a very rich man. I am even famous. My word is trusted in this foreign country. I am an authority in the highest forms of Oriental art. I will teach you everything. You will inherit my business—when you marry my daughter.”

“Sir,” he said, “have you talked with your daughter about this?”

For a thought had crept into his mind as he listened to Mr. Kung’s mellifluous, gentle voice, that father and daughter might have planned together this proposal. Perhaps Stephanie had even prepared for it by declaring to him previously that she did not wish to marry. Perhaps in fact she did. He had learned from Lady Mary that a woman could pretend indifference when in truth her heart was set upon something—upon someone.

“I have not spoken with my daughter,” Mr. Kung now said. “It would not have been fitting until I had your word. If you are willing—if you would even consider becoming my son, then my heart rejoices. I will go to my daughter at once. But no—you are American—I must not forget that. After I have spoken to her you shall speak to her yourself. I am not old-fashioned. I will permit it. I must remember she also is partly American. It is difficult for me to remember that. And yet I never forget it either. Now I will be silent. I await your answer.”

Mr. Kung smiled at him, a warm, welcoming smile, a smile of expectant happiness. He did not know how to begin. He understood by God-given instinct all that this good man, this aging Chinese father, was feeling. He shrank from hurting him, and yet he had his own life to fulfill in ways that were only just beginning to clarify. He had not faced marriage even as a possibility. Lady Mary had made the very thought of it impossible. She had ravaged some part of him. He was damaged somewhere in his inner soul. She had forced something in him too soon. What might have developed in him with natural beauty had been torn open. True, too, true, he had yielded when he should have resisted but what had at first been a physical surprise of delight had become a repulsive demand. He had indeed been used and therefore misused. Where, even if he married, it must be so different that the past would be cleansed.